Sunday, January 10, 2016

Metaprogramming is one of those cool academic topics that people always talk about but never seem all that practical or relevant to real-life programming. Sure, the idea of being able to reprogram your programming language sounds really cool, but how often do you need to do it? Is it really that useful to be able to change the behavior of your programming language? How often does a programmer need to do something like that? Shouldn't you be able to do everything in the programming language itself? It seems a lot like programming in Haskell--technically cool, but totally impractical.

I've recently started realizing that metaprogramming features in programming languages aren't important for technical reasons. Metaprogramming is important for social reasons. Metaprogramming is useful because it can extend the life of a programming language. Even if language designers stop maintaining a programming language and stop updating it with the new features, metaprogramming can allow other programmers to evolve it instead. Basically, metaprogramming wrestles some of the control of a programming language away from its main language stewards to outside programmers.

One of best examples of this is Java. Traditionally, Java isn't really considered to have good metaprogramming facilities. It has some pretty powerful components though.

It has a reflection API for querying objects at runtime.

It has a nice java.lang.reflect.Proxy class for creating new objects at runtime.

By abusing the classloading system, you can inspect the code of classes and create new classes.

The JVM instruction set is well-documented and fairly static, making it feasible for programs to generate new methods with new behavior.

The main missing pieces are

The instruction set is so big and complicated that it's cumbersome to analyze code or to generate new methods

You can't really override any of the JVM's behaviors or object behaviors

You can't really inspect or manipulate the running code of live objects

The crowning piece of the Java metaprogramming system though is annotations. To be honest, most of the real metaprogramming stuff is too complicated to figure out. Annotations, though, are simple. It's just a small bit of user-specified metadata that can be added to objects and methods. Its simplicity is what makes it so powerful. It's so simple to understand that many programmers have used annotations to trigger all sorts of new behaviors in Java. Annotations have been used and abused so much that their use is now widespread throughout the Java ecosystem. This type of metaprogramming is probably the most used metaprogramming facility in programming languages right now.

I believe that metaprogramming through annotations has allowed Java to evolve and to add new features despite long periods of inactivity from its stewards. For example, during the 10 years between Java 5 and Java 8, there weren't any major new language features to the Java language. While Java was stagnating during that period, other languages like C# or Scala were evolving by leaps and bounds. Despite this, Java was still considered competitive with others in terms of productivity. One of the reasons for this is that Java's metaprogramming facilities allowed library developers to add new features to Java without having to wait for Java's stewards. Java gained many powerful new software engineering capabilities during those 10 years that put it on the leading edge of many new software practices at the time. Metaprogramming was used to add database integration, query support, better testing, mocking, output templates, and dependency injection, among others, to Java. Metaprogramming saved Java. It allowed Java to be used in ways that its original language designers didn't anticipate. It allowed Java to evolve and stay relevant when its language stewards didn't have the resources to push it forward.

What I find worrisome, though, is that the latest language developments in Java are weakening its metaprogramming facilities. Java 8 weakened metaprogramming by not providing any reflection capabilities for lambdas. Lambdas are completely opaque to programs. They cannot be inspected or modified at runtime. From a functional/object-oriented cleanliness perspective, this is "correct." If an object/function exports the right interface, it shouldn't matter what's inside of it. But from a metaprogramming perspective, this causes problems because any metaprogramming code will be blind to entire sections of the runtime. Java 9 will further weaken metaprogramming by imposing extra visibility restrictions on modules. Unlike previous versions of Java, these visibility restrictions cannot be overridden at runtime by code with elevated security privileges. From a cleanliness perspective, this is "correct." For modules to work and be clean, normal code should never be able to override visibility restrictions. The problem is that the lack of exceptions hampers metaprogramming. Metaprogramming code cannot inspect or alter the behavior of huge chunks of code because it is prevented from seeing what's happening in other modules.

Although its great to see the Java language finally start improving again, the gradual loss of metaprogramming facilities might actually cause a long-term weakness in the language. As I mentioned earlier, I think the benefits of metaprogramming are social, not technical. It's a pressure valve that allows the broader programming community to add new behaviors to Java to suit their needs when the main language stewards are unable or unwilling to do so. With the language evolving relatively quickly at the moment, it's hard to see the benefits of metaprogramming. The loss of metaprogramming features will be felt in the future when outside developers can't extend the language with experimental new features and, as a result, the language fails to embrace new trends. The loss will be felt if there's ever another period of stagnation or conflict about the future direction of the language, and outside developers can't use metaprogramming to independently evolve the language. Hopefully, this gradual loss of metaprogramming support in Java is just a temporary problem and will not prove detrimental to the long-term health of the language.